Engagement Programs Part 2: Behaviors and Topic Interest

Marketo says companies that excel at lead nurturing generate
50% more sales-ready leads at a 33% lower cost.
That is reason enough to kick off a nurture strategy!

With personalization becoming the norm, we have a brilliant opportunity to engage prospects way beyond the unimpressive “Hello, .” In this day and age, tokenized emails tell the recipient, “we have your information in our database,” and nothing more. Instead, show your prospects that you care about their interests by delivering content specifically chosen for them.

How?

Step One: Identify your most impactful topics.
Start with the people that have already engaged with you in the past, and determine what pieces of content they engage with the most?
Once you identify your most engaging pieces of content, determine the commonality amongst them. Define categories based on subject. For example, a company that sells marketing software might have pieces that revolve around Account-Based Marketing, Sales/Marketing Alignment, and Inbound Marketing, while a company selling household appliances may have content focused on small appliances, major appliances, and energy-efficient products. If you don’t have a content matrix already defined, this is a great opportunity to develop one!

Step Two: Determine behaviors that indicate interest in these topics.
Create a chart of all your landing pages, emails, banner ads, social posts, and direct mail pieces that correlate to topics identified in Step One. This information allows us to segment our audience based on interest. For example, if someone clicks on an advertisement for a dishwasher, we can add them to our “Major Appliances” segment.

Step Three: Develop your content.
Now that you know which topics perform best, you can develop or repurpose content based on these subject matters. The more topics you identify, the more personalized you can get. When writing new content, keep in mind that just because someone may have clicked a link in a email, they aren’t necessarily ready to buy. Start out with educational pieces, and work your way up to more aggressive CTAs. If you’re repurposing content, run a report to highlight which pieces of content perform the best and deliver those assets first.

Quick tip: you can change the subject line in an email and re-send it to anyone who hasn’t opened it and double the number of emails you have in a nurture stream!

Step Four: Build the Marketo program.
Build a Marketo Engagement Program and add your new emails. Build a different stream for each topic, and add your content accordingly. Next, adjust your smart campaign to add anyone who exhibits behaviors identified in Step Two (also consider creating a global nurture controller, which will identify which leads belong to your various nurture programs). Now we can set up our transition rules to automatically shift someone’s stream as they exhibit qualifying behavior.

In our next blog post we will cover a technical deep-dive, stay tuned!

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